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Martin Amis has an important recent essay in the The Wall Street Journal about a new understanding of international terrorism that is emerging. In the course of the essay, however, Amis raises a series of vital issues that I will address over the course of several entries. The first is whether terrorism is really about religion even if its foot soldiers are almost all religious extremists? What are the different ramifications in terms of prevention and peacemaking? Even if terrorism is not essentially about religion we cannot abandon an engagement with religion because it motivates the foot soldiers.

Amis writes:

The two most stimulating international terrorism-watchers known to me are John Gray and Philip Bobbitt. Professor Gray (”Straw Dogs,” “Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern” and “Black Mass”) and Professor Bobbitt (”The Shield of Achilles” and the masterly “Terror and Consent”) are utterly unalike, except in brainpower and literary panache. Mr. Bobbitt is a proactive and muscular Atlanticist, whereas Mr. Gray is almost Taoist in his skepticism and his luminous passivity. Mr. Bobbitt is religious, and Mr. Gray is philo-religious (or, rather, wholly reconciled to the inexorability of religious belief); but neither man is an exponent of relativist politesse. And they assert, respectively, that international terrorism is “not about Islam” and has “no close connection to religion.”

Al Qaedaism, for them, is an epiphenomenon — a secondary effect. It is the dark child of globalization. It is the mimic of modernity: devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced and networked. According to Mr. Bobbitt, rather more doubtfully, Al Qaeda not only reflects the market state: it is a market state (”a virtual market state”). Globalization created great wealth and also great vulnerability; it created a space, or a dimension. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion; it is about human opportunism and the will to power.

Then what, you may be wondering, was all that talk about jihad and infidels and crusaders and madrasas and sharia and the umma and the caliphate? Why did people write whole books with titles like “A Fury for God” and “The Age of Sacred Terror” and “Holy War, Inc.”? There are several reasons for hoping that international terrorism isn’t about religion — not least of them the immense onerousness, the near-impossibility, now, of maintaining a discourse (I’ll put this simply) that makes distinctions between groups of human beings. Al Qaedaism may well evolve into not being about religion, about Islam. But one’s faculties insist that it is not not about religion yet.

Nicholas Kristoff’s very revealing piece on the Dalai Lama’s latest offer to the Chinese, if it is true, raises many fundamental issues about the price for peace.

Kristoff’s piece raises important questions that face the Dalai Lama regarding the future of his people, and the compromises that may be necessary with the Chinese regime in order to forestall the cultural genocide that is underway in Tibet. Should he settle with the Chinese finally? What is he surrendering, what is he getting for his people?

Where does justice fit in? Well, I hardly can imagine where it fits in. This conflict is so asymmetric and one side is so powerful that it hardly seems possible to hold out for justice as the cultural genocide and displacement of Tibetans by Han Chinese continues apace.

It seems to me that at the Dalai Lama’s age, and given the frustration of the youth who could end up in a hopeless rebellion against China, he has to make some hard choices. It seems he has to succumb to Chinese Communist rule in Tibet if he wants to make it possible for him and his people t return home. But, at least according to the article, what he could do is roll back not the political structure, but the displacement of native Tibetans. What this possibly sets the stage for is a better future in which an increasingly middle class Han China becomes less and less wedded to oppressive forms of governance of its outer provinces. The more secure China becomes in terms of its territorial integrity and its material success the less need to rule by oppression. Of course this is a risk, but the alternatives seem worse.

We have to ask what the Dalai Lama may be preventing in the future if he compromises now. In my next book, To Make the Earth Whole, I have two chapters dedicated to the ethics of intervention. In one of those chapters I explore the question of a Tibetan Buddhist ethic of intervention. I present it as a kind of quasi-Utilitarian calculus of consequences, what philosophers refer to as consequentialism. The basic question would be, what will cause the least suffering to the most people, present and future? More positively, what will cause the most happiness for the greatest number of people.

It is the future that is hardest for utilitarians to calculate in a way that is morally defensible. We simply don’t know what the future will bring. But the truth is that we all make these kind of imprecise and murky decisions every day, for things as simple as what three very different children in one family are going to do together on any given day. When it comes to trying to evolve away from violence and oppression for millions of people the choices are infinitely more fateful.

And there is one more proviso about consequentialism. The number of Tibetans in the world is tiny by comparison to the number of Han Chinese. Perhaps then from the point of view of a utilitarian calculus the Tibetans should lie down and die for the sake of the greater good of a Han Chinese living space? Yes, this is one of the great problems with this school of thought, and I am not going to solve it here.

It is obvious, however, that the Dalai Lama must consider this calculus for his own people because he is responsible for them. But he is also a Bodhissatva, an Enlightened Being. I don’t care whether the reader thinks he is, the point is that he and millions of others think that at the very least he spends his life trying to become a Boddhissatva. What would a Boddhissatva do? Not think only about his own people’s suffering or happiness, but that of all people, especially his enemies. This is the most endearing aspect of the Dalai Lama’s moral genius that is reflected in all his books and lectures.

I will speculate and say that perhaps the Dalai Lama might say that a radical sacrifice of all Tibetans for some Han Chinese would not bring true happiness to the Han Chinese, in addition to untold suffering for Tibetans. Genocide, even a single murder, eats away at the soul of the perpetrator just as surely as it consumes the body of the victim. So many conflicts involving the very strong and the very weak bear this out in reality when it is looked at over the long term.

It will be interesting to see what he does, what the Chinese do, what his people do, and what it will teach us.

It is hard to know what in this piece is designed to drive a wedge in the new Israeli/Syrian dialogue and what spells real trouble in terms of a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the United States and Russia. We may be seeing the undermining of the real possibility of peace between Syria and Israel. There is a march of folly, from Georgia’s move on South Ossetia, to Russia’s naked aggression, to the successful neo-conservative strategy of alienating everyone and anyone for eight years, including Russia (Did Poland really need an ABM defense right now? Is that what is going to make them safer?). It seems that reactionary forces in the United States may get their wish for a world in conflict that will push frightened American voters–and Israeli voters–in their direction once again. It is true that Russia has been headed in an anti-democratic direction for a long time, but there are interactive systems here, and one could imagine a world in which the United States had never destroyed Iraq, and where Russia could never feel justified on the world stage as doing the same to Georgia. But now we have a United States that prodded Israel to confront Syria, and now a Syria being prodded to put Russia missiles a few miles from Tel Aviv in order for Moscow to make a point to Washington. What a waste of an opportunity for positive change. And a fine gift before Bush leaves office.

The Times of London reports:

Syria raised the prospect yesterday of having Russian missiles on its soil, sparking fears of a new Cold War in the Middle East. President Assad said as he arrived in Moscow to clinch a series of military agreements: “We are ready to co-operate with Russia in any project that can strengthen its security.”

The Syrian leader told Russian newspapers: “I think Russia really has to think of the response it will make when it finds itself closed in a circle.”

Mr Assad said that he would be discussing the deployment of Russian missiles on his territory. The Syrians are also interested in buying Russian weapons.

In return Moscow is expected to propose a revival of its Cold War era naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, which would give the Russian Navy its first foothold in the Mediterranean for two decades. Damascus and Moscow were close allies during the Cold War but the Kremlin’s influence in the region waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yesterday’s rapprochement raised the possibility that Moscow intends to re-create a global anti-Western alliance with former Soviet bloc allies.

Many in Israel fear that the Middle East could once again become a theatre for the two great powers to exert their spheres of influence, militarily and politically. And with Israel and the US providing military backing to Georgia, Russia appears set to respond in kind by supporting Syria.

Tom Friedman is worth reading on sharing the blame for Moscow’s aggression:

If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams.

Let’s start with us. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was among the group - led by George Kennan, the father of “containment” theory, Senator Sam Nunn and the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum - that argued against expanding NATO, at that time.

It seemed to us that since we had finally brought down Soviet communism and seen the birth of democracy in Russia the most important thing to do was to help Russian democracy take root and integrate Russia into Europe. Wasn’t that why we fought the cold war - to give young Russians the same chance at freedom and integration with the West as young Czechs, Georgians and Poles? Wasn’t consolidating a democratic Russia more important than bringing the Czech Navy into NATO?

All of this was especially true because, we argued, there was no big problem on the world stage that we could effectively address without Russia - particularly Iran or Iraq. Russia wasn’t about to reinvade Europe. And the Eastern Europeans would be integrated into the West via membership in the European Union.

No, said the Clinton foreign policy team, we’re going to cram NATO expansion down the Russians’ throats, because Moscow is weak and, by the way, they’ll get used to it. Message to Russians: We expect you to behave like Western democrats, but we’re going to treat you like you’re still the Soviet Union. The cold war is over for you, but not for us.

“The Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams acted on the basis of two false premises,” said Mandelbaum. “One was that Russia is innately aggressive and that the end of the cold war could not possibly change this, so we had to expand our military alliance up to its borders. Despite all the pious blather about using NATO to promote democracy, the belief in Russia’s eternal aggressiveness is the only basis on which NATO expansion ever made sense - especially when you consider that the Russians were told they could not join. The other premise was that Russia would always be too weak to endanger any new NATO members, so we would never have to commit troops to defend them. It would cost us nothing. They were wrong on both counts.”

The humiliation that NATO expansion bred in Russia was critical in fueling Putin’s rise after Boris Yeltsin moved on. And America’s addiction to oil helped push up energy prices to a level that gave Putin the power to act on that humiliation. This is crucial backdrop.

But the comment from khertog is well taken. There is a long history here of descent away from democracy with many warning signals in Russia, and that is why I emphasized yesterday that we have alot of work to do in terms of engagement and building up the forces for democracy in this vast region. That should have been the bulk of our effort, as Friedman suggests.

I have a friend, Bryan Hamlin, who has been an amazing citizen diplomat all his life, who helps entities in conflict understand each other, especially at critical hours. What I mean by ‘citizen diplomat’ is a person who takes it upon himself to build relationships between enemy groups, or between his own culture and a culture with which he or his country is in conflict. My next book, To Make the Earth Whole, will deal at great length with citizen diplomats because I believe they are the hope of the future, inching the globe toward greater integration, cooperation, and community.

Bryan had two great pre-occupations of his career as a citizen diplomat, the Palestinian/Jewish relationship, and the Russian/Western relationship. He chose wisely, for these remain the deepest challenges to the future of humanity. What we have seen in Georgia proves this.

One of the most exhilarating moments of my younger years was watching Boris Yeltsin, future President of Russia, on top of a tank challenging the Soviet Union to radically change, and resisting a Communist attempted coup.

During an August 1991 coup attempt, Yeltsin stands on a tank urging the crowd to resist the hard-line Communists trying to depose Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

At that moment Yeltsin embodied all the noble Russians in the history of the twentieth century, from those who stood up to the Czar to those who stood up to the Communists, all longing for dignity, freedom, and equality. And, conversely, I had a bad feeling about George Bush praying with Putin. It had the feeling of a con game, and, of course, there was a history of Mr. Bush’s knack for choosing violent men to be on his team.

Now we stand before petrified Baltic states, and it is sad to see. Recently I had some interactions with the world of conservative Russia, and I realize how deeply we neglected the challenge of engagement with them, how contested is the language of human rights, how much it is often reviled as a Western European trick, an American imperialist invention, how closed in the world of religion is to change.

The typical American response will be armament, and we may see this as the great new cause of American conservatives, “standing up to Russia’. I do not deny the importance of defense of Central Europe, but this will be the ‘same’ole same’ole’: ‘They’ provide ‘us’ with another excuse for a permanent military-industrial complex and military escalation. Great economic profits for a few that will just sink us globally.

What we need to do as global citizen diplomats is to launch a massive diplomatic effort to engage Russians, especially conservative Russians, in conversation about democracy, human rights, and international cooperation. And the conversations will be very tough, but the relationships are bound to flourish, as they always do when the effort is authentic. As usual, the conversations if they are good will change us as well as them.

We should have been investing in this massive effort since the Berlin Wall came down but we did not. We just thought as nice fat American capitalists that it was just wonderful to see an evolving Moscow culture of fat capitalists. And we thought, ‘You see, we won. They have come over to our way’. I watched so many people watch this unfold on Fox News, with such an obscene sense of satisfaction. Democracy did not matter, it was wealth in Moscow that was the great messiah.

This was arrogant and unfair, and now we are paying a price for thinking that big international business would change the dangerous relationship between Russia and its neighbors that goes back many centuries. I am not against private enterprise at all, but I am against its deification.

No, the only thing that will transform that relationship between Russia and its neighbors, that will make aggression and bullying a thing of the past, is a cultural/economic transformation along the lines of the European Union. There has to be some new set of entities and relationships created between Russians and their neighbors that will make bullying unthinkable, just as it is now between Germany and its neighbors.

The evolution of state relationships in a positive direction is not fantasy. It happens all the time. But it does not happen on its own. Never. We have to make it happen as we evolve our thinking and behavior, and that is the great challenge of Europe and the United States as it faces this massive Eurasian entity called Russia. New thinking is required, and millions of new relationships must be engaged.

The fact that Musharraf is resigning is excellent news. Yesterday’s news that the military was not going to interfere with his impeachment is far more important. The military was prepared to turn its back on Musharraf’s old ways, of engineering military coups, possibly assassinations, and throwing thousands of democracy proponents in jail.

This is a major turning point in the history of modern Pakistan, and perhaps the beginning of an authentic democratic evolution. The foundation of democracy is the willingness of militaries to submit to civilian rule. The only reason that the United States achieved democracy as early as it did is because General George Washington went home. With all that power and popularity, amazingly, he just went home! It was a damn miracle in history. Only after constant prodding did he accept the Presidency. He never had imperial ambitions, though he easily could have succumbed to that common drug of military leadership.

What is interesting for negotiation and conflict resolution is what, according the report, the Pakistani military does expect from the civilian procedure. It does not want a humiliation of Musharraf, or his execution. As Commander in Chief of the Army, the military leadership is suggesting that this would cause too much of a rift with the rank and file of a proud military sub-culture. A tough pill to swallow for those who have been victims.

Once again, positive increments of violence prevention and conflict mitigation require some agonizing moral compromises. But these might be a small price to pay for the future of over a billion and a half people on the Indian sub-continent. The stability of the Pakistani/Indian relationship depends on the evolution of democracy in both countries. In addition, Pakistan, as a non-Arab Islamic country, and a front-line state of the old Cold War and the present War on Terror, as well as the internecine Sunni/Shi’ite global conflict, desperately needs civilian rule to iron out its domestic challenges with old and new wars. The world needs Pakistan to have civilian rule. Let Musharraf go in peace, in order to inch billions toward greater stability and peace.

A young Pakistani man who I met recently said to me, “If Pakistan is safe the world is safe, if Pakistan is in danger then the world is in danger, because we have “atom.” And Pakistan is in deep danger.” He was sincere, persuasive, brilliant, but also blunt in that special way that survivors whose lives are in danger tend to be. He was also on a mission to rediscover the religion of his youth, an Islam he could be proud of. He watched helplessly in his lifetime as the contest for Pakistan and Afghanistan that ensued between the Soviet Union, Iran, the United States, and Saudi Arabia morphed into a bloody battle in the name of religion.

The young man, who we will call Malik, has been searching to restore the earlier Islamic culture to his native Pakistan, but the forces arrayed against him are enormous. This is what Malik reported to me as a graduate of several of the more extreme madrasas. Religion is a tool but criminality is the root of the matter. There are three major sources of funding for jihadis now: kidnapping wealthy children, drug sales, and the misguided ideologies of a small group of wealthy Pakistanis with nationalist designs on the region, from Kashmir to Afghanistan, who take advantage of poor youth.

At least half of the recruits of extreme madrasas have no interest in the ideology but are there to make a living. That having been said, once they are “on the team” they are bound to a dark world of thugs disguising themselves as righteous leaders who train their teams to debate and defeat their religious competitors. If necessary they kill rivals who may pray in a slightly different way, or dress a slightly different way. In other words, this is gang warfare for personal gain of unscrupulous leaders, some of whom are sufficiently hypocritical that they traffic in stolen boys for personal sexual use. Piety is nowhere to be found.

If this is the environment what is the strategy of the United States’ aid package? The government of the United States and the government of Pakistan are addicted to aid in the form of excessive military hardware. It satisfies only corrupt constituencies in both countries. A fraction of that aid redirected at the building of schools could make a major dent in jihadi training.

The Saudis are already pumping in significant money into more moderate madrasas, but they have the capacity to do much more with the surplus in oil revenues. It is a good bargain. Pakistan can be a testing ground for the Saudi King’s new emphasis on interfaith relations. His most recent groundbreaking statements on interfaith relations would make it very easy to fund madrasa education in Pakistan that emphasizes an embrace of Sunni-Shi’ite relations, for example.

Malik’s vision is for interfaith harmony, but he is so angry at the hypocrisy of the jihadi leadership that he wanted me to tell the world in his name what is going on. We engaged intensely for hours, and then I looked him in the eyes and said, “I am going to pull rank on you. I am fifty, and you are half my age. When I was your age I was angry too, but engaging in a negative campaign will put you in danger with your own people, as I did with mine. There is nothing constructive in dying.” He said unsurprisingly, “I am on a mission, and it is ok to die for a mission.” I said, “Why fight against them for two years and then die, when instead you can lead the way positively for the next half a century in fostering a noble Islam?” That gave him pause.

The United States has done enough damage to the millions of Pakistani youngsters caught up in the left-over ravages of the Cold War. Reverse the aid package: redirect the majority of the billions in current aid into education, jobs and health, and give peaceful Islam a chance. Set up a major Pakistani-American private sector council to advise and direct the aid in a way that will create job opportunities in both countries. This is the real way to undermine the jihadi leadership, stabilize Pakistan, and make us all safer. More importantly, Malik deserves to live a long life, and so do his spiritual dreams.

Donna Bryson reports in the Boston Globe today that Mugabe has accepted an arrangement in which Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition movement, will become Prime Minister with a variety of important responsibilities.

Protesters in Johannesburg demonstrated yesterday against Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, whose role has been a major sticking point in the contentious power-sharing talks. (jerome delay/Associated Press)

Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the Mugabe era’s destruction of Zimbabwe, and perhaps this is an important milestone for President Mbeki of South Africa who has been brokering this deal in person all week.

Tsvangirai said compromise is necessary because Zimbabweans would reject a deal “if any party is greedy.”

“We have agreed that Mr. Mugabe will be president whilst I become prime minister,” he told the SADC ministers. “We envisage that the prime minister must chair the Cabinet and be responsible for the formulation, execution and administration of government business, including appointing and dismissing his ministers. . . . A prime minister cannot be given responsibility without authority and be expected to deliver.”

Tsvangirai, whose party won the most seats in Parliament in the March elections, is proposing that the president have no power to veto laws. The opposition also proposed that the president “shall be commander in chief of the defense forces of Zimbabwe,” but exercise that power on the advice of the prime minister.

This all sounds promising–except the last part. True security and transformation of relations after bitter warfare requires a sense of safety. This can only come with negotiations over the control of guns, police, and military. I would suggest that the opposition party receive the right to hire new personnel at every level of the police and military, say at least 50% of all new hires every year. This would allow Mugabe’s people a sense that they will not be arrested tomorrow, if ever, but allow the voice of the democratic elections to express itself in real terms of the transition or transformation of the use of force. Nonviolent transition requires that everyone feel safe in the process.

I had written a piece earlier on Leo Kramer’s pioneering work supporting Palestinian and Israeli doctors who work together. Leo’s follow-up article, Israeli, Palestinian Doctors Affect Change on the Ground, is even more revealing. Leo writes that the medical work is vital because doing is more important than talking, a theme I have been trying to push recently in It Is What You Do That Defines You. Leo writes:

These efforts, however, must also be directed toward achieving results on the ground. That means ameliorating the insecurity of the Israelis, while addressing the deprivation of the Palestinians, their need for medical services, goods, utilities, food and freedom of movement. The overt violence of the conflict is bad enough for both sides, without the medical and humanitarian border crises, which thwart the struggle to maintain a basic standard of living for the Palestinians.

To properly approach security and standard of living concerns, we must consider the following:

1. Israel came to agreements with Egypt and Jordan without demanding that they first recognize Israel.

2. The Palestinians do not have the military capability to invade Israel. They can do harm to nearby cities, but a Palestinian invasion is out of the question.

3. To believe in democracy and promote it by deeds as well as words means countries (including the United States and Israel) must accept the results of an honest election, even though they did not support the winners.

4. When the deeds do not match the words, trust is lost. After an election that was certified as honest by observers from the United States, necessities which cross the border to Gaza were rationed, cut back, and limited. What religious tradition advocates such actions against a civilian population? Certainly the Christian, Muslim or Jewish religions would not justify such a response.

5. Israel recently prevented university students from Gaza to travel abroad to study at institutions which had already accepted them. This involved hundreds of students who are still waiting for permission to cross the border, including Fulbright scholars to American universities. It is to Israel’s advantage to have an educated populace at their border, especially if they have received their education in the western tradition.

Deeds much more than words define relationships between adversaries. The beauty of positive gestures and deeds is that they often can be crafted in such a way as to give away nothing strategically but to make a profound impact on the psychology of conflict. The key to the future is not peace or conflict resolution, which can elude us for so many reasons at any given time. It is our deeds that promote a positive change in human relationships. Every purposeful act of humiliation creates ten more enemies. Every authentic act of generosity, kindness or respect creates ten more friends. This much we can be certain of in a chaotic world.